Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 7:23 ends the Flood with six words the reader will never forget: Noah only was left, and they who were with him in the ark.
The Targum has just finished its catalogue of ruin — man and cattle, creeping thing and soaring bird, all the bodies of the living, all perished from the earth. Then the sentence pivots on the word only. Noah alone remains. Not Noah the hero, not Noah the strong. Noah the one who listened.
Jewish tradition has always read this verse as the truest definition of righteousness. A tzaddik is not someone who survives because he is clever. He survives because he obeyed the hard instruction when no one else would. Noah spent 120 years, by rabbinic reckoning, building a boat on dry land while his neighbors mocked him. The word only is his reward and his grief in the same breath — he is alive, and he is alone.
The takeaway the Maggid draws from this verse: sometimes faithfulness looks like standing in a floating house, surrounded by silence, and trusting that the silence is not the end of the story.